The Ikea Marathon

9 December 2008

As promised, here is the long, long story of our trip to Ikea last weekend.

As previously mentioned, Ikea’s delivery rates are outrageous. So we thought we’d be clever and hire a truck to get to Ikea. Mandy kindly offered to drive us around for the day which was an enormous help — we literally could not have got our stuff without her!

So we picked our U-Haul up early on Sunday morning and drove to Ikea. What started as a small rain shower turned into a full blown snowstorm by the time we got parked up — at the time we hoped it wasn’t an omen of things to come!

Sap had prepared our shopping list (having extensively researched all the bits and pieces we needed online first) so we hit the entrance knowing what we needed. Prime amongst those requirements was a bed — a nice, new, comfy bed. From the Malm range. In oak. Queen size.

As we walked through the entrance, I saw a sign — Ikea had just finished their Black Friday sale — and on it, at the top, were three words I really had hoped we wouldn’t see next to our bed.

Out of stock.

Unbelievable! I was livid. All that way and we could even get the first thing we needed. We were incredibly downbeat! But Sap said we should push on, so we did. Next up was some new bed clothes for our non-existant bed. The purple ones Sap had chosen — out of stock. We couldn’t believe it! At this rate we’d end up taking a couple of sets of coathangers back in the truck!

However, I had misread the sign. Ikea had offered a limited quantity of our bed at a discount price, and it was these that were sold out. There were plenty left at the regular price! Added to that, Sap found a pile of the purple bed clothes that we were after. So we went from utter dispair to unlimited joy (really, the emotions were that extreme!) in the space of a minute or so.

Anyway, the rest of the trip was fairly uneventful. We managed to load four trolleys with everything we needed. As expected, I nearly had heart failure when the total came up on the till! But we were starting from scratch and we hadn’t compromised on anything that we wanted, so we were happy.

We got all our lovely new stuff loaded into the truck (the snowstorm was still in full flow!) and headed home. We knew we would need to use the freight elevator at the apartment to get everything up — the bed in particular was quite heavy. We’d arranged beforehand to use it from 6.30 for half an hour and we just managed to make it. It was quite a rush to get back and I must admit to feeling very stressed — I kept picturing our new apartment furniture stranded downstairs!

But we made it. Just. Then we had a beer on the balcony of our new home and Ben & Mandy took the truck back. By now it was gone 9pm but I was determined to build our new bed!

I eventually got done just after midnight and we gratefully slipped into a nice, new, big, comfy bed.

I would, of course, spend the next few evenings assembling various bits of furniture but it’s all worth it. The bedroom looks great and the TV stand (expertly assembled by Sap) is lovely. We can’t wait to continue furnishing the apartment — we’re steering clear of Ikea though! Think I’ve had my fill of flatpack Swedish design for one lifetime…

There are more photos of ‘apartment life’ over at Flickr, so go have some fun looking at the various boxes. See if you can spot our first meal in the apartment — we ate it off a box!